2012.01.10

The Top 30 Albums of 2011: 30-11

30. A$AP Rocky – LIVELOVEA$AP

If you’re listening to LIVELOVEA$AP for quality of rapping, you’re doing it wrong. He may have gotten the three-million dollar label advance, but A$AP Rocky’s rudimentary MC skills are mostly window-dressing for the post-apocalyptic genre-mashing on display. A$AP Rocky is simply a very good poster boy for what, in some ways, is hip-hop’s punk rock moment—what with the A$AP Crew, Main Attrakionz and Lil B collectively imagining rap rebuilt from the basics up, set to soundtracks of slow-motion YouTube videos of the Twin Towers falling (and if this makes Odd Future this era’s Ramones, that’s just the price we have to pay.) A$AP Rocky’s true gift lies in his Tim Tebow-like ability to rally everyone around him toward a central cause. He utilizes bombastic production from new jack Clams Casino; resurrects and reinvents Screw music ; and makes ugly-ass practitioner Spaceghostpurrp seem respectable. Then, every once in a while, he makes a stunning play himself—most often in the form of a concise, forceful line like his mantra, “I’m a pretty motherfucker.” Pretty being the exact quality needed for a figurehead. -MB

29. Moon Duo - Mazes

Heavily saturated with noise, striding across abandoned landscapes, Mazes saw the latest phase in Moon Duo’s attempt to figure out how far they want to go with the what they’re able to create. The basics haven't changed: Sanae Yamada sets the tempo with her keyboards and some electric what nots, and then Erik Johnson (of Wooden Shjips fame) rips around alongside on guitar. Vocals are a mix of the back and forth regulars--imperative statements and mumbled nature references--and the songs all tap out around five minutes. As with their previous releases, the album works as both sludgy background palliative (think Brian Eno’s Music For Slow-Motion Stumblings Through Dark, Druggy Basements) as well as old fashioned headphone friendly immersion trip. Months later, this chamber seems inexhaustible. -TS

28. SBTRKT - SBTRKT

The inherent contradiction in dubstep-derived pop is that it pits an inherently insular genre against an extroverted one. The obvious compromise involves dialing up dubstep’s flashier qualities—enormous bass, toy-box melodies, and metal-machine squall—to meet pop’s exuberance. It’s something that producers Joker and Benga successfully pull off on “The Vision (Breathe In)” and Katy B’s “Katy on a Mission,” respectively, without veering anywhere near Skrillex’s bombast-overload. But, across his first full-length album, SBTRKT’s Aaron Jerome takes a less-traveled route, retaining the subtle pleasures of dubstep (and UK garage, and UK funky) while turning in an unrestrained pop album. Jerome creates a cohesive sound using a wide array of vocalists, including UK funky stalwarts Sampha, Jesse Ware, and Roses Gabor, as well as Little Dragon’s Yukimi Nagano. Their performances revel in a sort of reawakened hope—diva moves from a small party in a dingy basement. Rather than blowing songs out of the water, each vocalist ducks in and out of SBTRKT’s delicate, intricate framework—gentle encouragement for subtle dancing. -MB

27. Nicolas Jaar - Space Is Only Noise

Nicolas Jaar’s debut album is full of voices: Jaar’s own singing voice, but dialog taken from films in french and english, children playing - sometimes crying - in the distance, diced up breathing and muttering, Ray Charles. There is a physicality as well - running water, shoreline sounds, pingpong balls, hands moving across a piano. Ostensibly, this is a collection downtempo electronic music. There is enough evidence here of that for it to be classified as it and nothing else. But there is a surprising amount of found sound and manipulation of sound here. Things like fake cd skips deleting instruments and replacing them with new ones, playing the same rhythm. The final result is something that resembles nothing else but memory, messy and deliberate, fragmented and cohesive at the same time - reconstructing songs (if you want to call them songs) out of whatever is left after the passage of time. Jaar states “space is only noise if you can see”, elsewhere someone else states “the monuments have been brought down to earth, and made part of the land”. By the end of the album, it seems like memory destroys the divides between things - space/ noise/ land/ sea/ sound/ music/ self/ others. -SW

26. Iceage - New Brigade

Besides mixing up about fourteen kinds of genres, as long as all of those genres involve loud drums and hyphenated words like “post-punk”, New Brigade also made use of its scant runtime to champion the strongest case since Kanye for relying on a band’s preferred listening order. Following the requisite 45 second noise intro, “White Rune” gets down to the business of laying out everything you’re about to experience. One: you’re not going to understand most of the lyrics, and won’t need to. Two: all of these songs are going to end about a minute before you want them to. Three: there is still plenty of room left in your life for a quartet of loud teenagers, especially Danish ones who tell the New York Times they heard New Jersey has good sandwiches, and maybe the next album will be longer? Somebody take a note: the hype is there for a good reason, and this is one of those times. -TS

25. Wild Flag - Wild Flag

Carrie Brownstein is, in many ways, the last guitar god standing. Any and all candidates you want to throw out just seem like shadows of other better players, or are too busy doing other thing to still be in the running. Wild Flag’s songs are written by Brownstein or Mary Timony, and while this isn’t a “guitar album”, what is most enervating about listening to it is to hear their two guitars ricochet off one another, how exciting that can be even in 2011. The songs - Timony’s feel more tuneful, Brownstein’s feel more savage - both are frequently about music in a way most bands haven’t been writing songs since... well rappers rapped about DJs and metal bands sung about metal. It feels like a very organic growth from a band that clearly derives all of its power from playing together - this isn’t a conceptual decision, it’s a byproduct. On “Future Crimes” Carrie Brownstein belts out “If you’re gonna be a restless soul/ then you’re gonna be so so tired/ if you’re gonna give up on the fight/ then I’m gonna call you a liar”, updating her previous “Entertain” for the moment, where the problem is no longer “who’s side are you on” but are you committed? To anything at all? This is organic too. -SW

24. Battles - Gloss Drop

Hey, Battles,what makes you think you’re so funky? Here’s an album made out of the stuff of prog-jazz-funk, by the kind of dudes who understand how to play in 17/39 time, but the end result is something you want to dance to. This is as confounding and exciting as the last time they did it, only without a breakout single to distract from the nature of the thing. This is an entirely physical album, one that’s effect is not aimed towards the musically trained listener’s mind but the body of anyone in earshot. On paper, Battles sounds like a mathletics league, but in execution it’s music that shuts your brain off and has you doing stupid dances to augmented 9ths or some other thing I’ll never understand even after it’s explained to me. Gloss Drop sidesteps any and all conversation about their musical acumen and asks us to dance with somebody, and like Whitney Huston before them, they’ve succeeded. -SW

23. M83 - Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming

I recently had a conversation with a friend of mine that Anthony Gonzalez would never get away with any of the shit he does without being french, and it is something you’ve got to wonder about - if culturally you’re allowing for extravagances and gestures you’d scoff at if they were on an album made by some kid from Portland, if you’d really be as into it if it weren’t coming from the place where Air, Daft Punk, and Phoenix defined our parameters of taste. It’s something I’ve thought more and more about M83 because I never used to care - here was the all-digital Kevin Shields, but album-by-album in distorted noise vistas have been replaced by plaintive voices and obliteration has been replaced by naked emotionality. Which isn’t to say that all of that wasn’t present in the M83 to begin with, but it has since taken the forefront. There is a lot more bombast evident in everything, and there are certainly times where you wonder if you’re giving this record a pass because it’s french or if you really like what’s being done as much as you did “Unrecorded”. In execution, though, this is an album that earns every one of its excesses. Even at it’s most ridiculous, there is no artifice here. Or maybe, there is, but it is a particularly gorgeous artifice, one that moves past the pan and scan John Hughes worship of the previous album and goes somewhere a lot more anamorphic. -SW

22. Unknown Mortal Orchestra – Unknown Mortal Orchestra

Despite this year’s R&B-to-indie/indie-to-R&B mass transmigration, few artists have made more palpable arguments in favor of white funk’s continued existence than Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s debut album. The media-shy Portland band finds groove within the whitest of white inspirations—Grateful Dead guitar jangle, 2nd generation garage rock, Peter Frampton—and implants it into indie-rock tropes. “Little Blue House” and album opener “Ffunny Ffrends,” for instance, roll certified break-beats through Vetiver-trademarked freak-folk territory. But it’s the pivotal track, “How Can U Luv Me” that makes a serious case for Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s soul. I imagine it as a corollary to Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings’ “How Long Do I Have to Wait for You?,” with horns subbed out for fuzzy guitar, and in-the-red production in the place of R&B sheen. -MB

21. Gnod - In Gnod We Trust

One of (at least) three Gnod releases this year, In Gnod We Trust is a little over a half hour long, comprised of two songs--”Tony’s First Communion” and “Vatican”--and yet it happens to be one of the heaviest albums on this list. Both tracks are built around repetitive, incredibly loud core sounds--"Tony’s" is some kind of swelling bass, like a gigantic alien heart arytyhmia, whereas “Vatican” is a mix of various howls and some kind of never-ending organ noise--that a variety of other sounds approach and interact with. The core never really merges with those bits, but considering the conceit of the album (the press release that accompanys the music is a fantastic piece of faux-sermon), maybe those core noises are meant to serve as some approximation of monotheistic metal deity. Who can keep up with religion these days? -TS

20. Washed Out - Within and Without

When they start giving out prizes for album-art-that-best-describes-one’s-sound (they probably already do this), one hopes the committee will retroactively give a statue to Ernest Greene for Within and Without. Clambering bodies, eyes closed, sun baked flesh-to-flesh cast against bright white sheets, with private vocals whispered by a tongue that’s pressed directly against your warm earlobe, this is the chillwave album that snuck past people’s visceral standoffishness with that goddamned “chillwave” moniker. (Or “dreampop”. Never has there been a term more suited as a defense for homicide than the word “dreampop”.) Fuck that thinking, though. This is a great electro suite, a languid sonic bath that takes old ESG tones and turns them into the grown up version of a bubble pit. Sure, there’s going to be moments where your ear says “you realize you’re dancing to the sound of somebody dragging a sharpie across a piece of copier paper”, but power through that shit. Nobody ever kissed a negative nelly, and in the future, we’re going to be stabbing all the wallflowers anyway. -TS

19. Eleanor Friedberger - Last Summer

The paradox of making anything is that it either has to be “timeless”, implying that it could exist at any time, at least any time where mass produced electronically recorded music was easily available. It means that it could have been released at any point between now and whatever point we currently don’t feel alienated from (so right now 70s/80s whereas the 50s/60s are starting to be periods we set tv shows. Look they wear ties and drink!). The other approach is to make music of its time - especially rap and dance music, which kind of have right NOW built into their dna simply by the way their music is released and listened to, as opposed to like, indie rock or country or whatever. The problems with both - timeless can mean who gives a shit and current can mean disposable and empty. So Friedberger manages to avoid the pitfalls of both, crafting an album full of songs that could have come out any time in the past 40 years but are still explicitly tied to a place and time. Specifically: last summer, Brooklyn, 2010. It’s hallmark is songs about being lovesick and scrolling through your inbox in bed. A very current experience, one that might be too fleeting to write a great song about. The details here - from the movies that were playing that summer to the giggle of the drug dealer she runs into - are what make Friedberger’s songs have some real emotional weight to them. The other thing is that... well there isn’t a bad song on here, and there isn’t one that doesn’t quietly get better with each listen, that’ll have you singing along with the phrasing you squirmed at on first play. Last Summer feels so alive without really being one of those “snapshot” records that always seem like someone singing their diary entries. Maybe the only one of those that ever actually felt this alive was Illmatic, which is a ridiculous comparison, especially considering what mid-30s Friedberger and 20 year old Nas have in common, but it feels like that vibrant a depiction of someones life, and how often does that happen? -SW

18. Belong - Common Era

Common Era sounds like it was recorded miles away in some sort of cavernous industrial space, the sonic provenance of A Place To Bury Strangers even as the songs have the feel of a better-than-you-remember Slowdive single. This isn’t really shoegaze or shitgaze or even really noise music at all. It’s just a series of delicate pop songs recorded in a way to disguise how that is all they are. Belong’s second album is one that lives and dies on how well the melodies grab you, from under layers and layers of white noise and reverb - and largely the album sticks. Tthe production has a very specific effect, forcing the listener to take each piece as a whole. There are no discernible lyrics, no real dissectable aspects of each song other than drums. Each song is its own fiber optics image, no aspect of it not containing its entire corpus. What makes this different from your average pop album is that deliberate presentation, demanding that it be taken on its terms rather than anyone who listens. Common Era makes what could be a gimmick or a style into intent. -SW

17. Grails - Deep Politics

While Grails has always seemed like the band you think Earth is warming up to become (until you listen to Earth and realize that no, that’s pretty much it), Deep Politics might be the album that puts their name at the forefront when it comes time to talk Western post-rock. It’s merited. “Future Primitive” opens Deep Politics with the latest bastard hybrid of Morricone and death metal, but by the end, the song has splintered open, ejaculating the sorts of LA cosmic guitar riffs that are stock & trade samples for M83 wannabes. After that, the game is on: it’s just a question of which bricks are going into the stew. There’s some fucked up New Age in “Corridors of Power”, stuff that wouldn’t be out of place if you go to a massage parlor where all sessions are concluded by cutting the electricity and abandoning you to your shame. There’s the weird cinematic work of the title track, where the guitar work chases around the idea of public displays of sorrow and revenge--"Deep Politics" indeed--all of which wrap up with the same sort of orchestral cornballing that our brains have been taught to seek true love amongst. Fuck the agrarian transition: this is what we’re talking about when we talk about the Great Leap Forward. -TS

16. Cults - Cults

According to the July 2007 FBI Law Enforcement bulletin, Stockholm syndrome usually involves the following conditions: “captors who do not abuse the victim, a long duration before resolution, continued contact between the perpetrator and hostage, and a high level of emotion.” That sound like a great metaphor for relationships for you? Cults thought so too. Across ten songs that echo 60’s girl groups like The Shangri-La’s, the East-Coast-by-way-of-West-Coast duo’s debut album seizes on the idea of kindness as emotional manipulation. Often the songs sound romantic, but actually live in the grey area between codependency and abuse. They’re accentuated with samples of speeches by Jim Jones and his ilk, all reminiscent of the legions of self-help platitudes that we presently use to define ourselves and our relationships. “I can never heal myself enough for you,” Madeline Follin sings at one point, revealing some hippy-speak unattainable ideal that her man expects of her. Most important, though, is that sound, steeped in the tradition of songs like The Crystals’ “He Hit Me (And It Felt Like a Kiss).” Cults’ melodies are as seductive as the promise of a new, better life. They hook you. Then they abduct you. Then they indict you. -MB

15. Main Attrakionz - 808s & Dark Grapes II

"I’m a diamond of God,” chants MondreM.A.N., “but a neighbor of Satan.” Like their buddy A$AP Rocky, Main Attrakionz trade in rap that hinges on plainspoken but intricately constructed statements. The Bay Area twosome’s 808s & Dark Grapes II digs into the central theme of post-Biggie gangster rap: the desire to be good, buoyed by the urge to do bad. It’s well-worn material, but statements like Mondre’s nail the angel/devil polarity precisely—it’s the kind of street poetry doesn’t need poetics; it just fucks around with big themes and taps into meaning. Producers like Friendzone, Giorgio MoMurda (have I mentioned how much I love that dude’s name?), and Main Attrakionz’ Squadda B use Clams Casino’s Instrumentals the way that The Grind Date’s producers used The Blueprint as a search engine for ideas. New Age piano, swaths of ambient noise, and castrati choral voices accentuate Squadda and Mondre’s songs, always reaching toward the sublime and sometimes grasping it. -MB

14. Zola Jesus - Conatus

As a cultural genre, goth deserves every sling and arrow thrown at it, if for no other reason than because it’s so gosh darn fun to throw them. (Even the most tolerant would agree: people in vampire clubs are the most humorless of pits.) And by rights, level the criticisms at Conatus all you want, but don’t be deceived into mistaking its gentile qualities--air gulped vocals, synthesized homemade bass lines--for fragility. It’s a classically structured sleight of hand, songs that move past the edge of comprehension; more passion songs about love than love songs passionately sung. The same things that make that aforementioned subculture so trite--its lack of purpose, its hasty retreat into the safe, the make-believe--is what’s entirey absent from the Conatus project. That opening blend of Aphex Twin style gargled electro isn’t ill-thought, not a scam, it’s a promise; this is what we’ll put inside you, what we’ll feed you now. The jagged stripped down, delivered with a history vocal you might not have accepted otherwise. It’s a worthwhile deception. -TS

13. Yuck – Yuck

A lot has been made of how closely Yuck hews to the sound of 90s bands like Dinosaur Jr, Teenage Fanclub, and Yo La Tengo. Thing is, the London-based group is less a tribute band than it is the Platonic ideal of two decades of indie rock. On their self-titled album, Yuck refine the shortcomings and rough edges of their forebears. If that brings to mind a homogenized version of a decades-old sound, well, that may be hard to dispute; but it’s also hardly the point. Yuck seem less interested in sound than they are in songs—that is, they use the components of 90s bands’ sound to craft timeless songs. And, since Yuck doesn’t aim for the emotionally disaffected audience that 90s indie rock targeted, their songs possess the sort of brazen emotional scope and impact that Pavement never attempted. The result is an album that splits between anthems (“Get Away,” “The Wall,” “Georgia,” “Operation”) and ballads (“Suicide Policeman,” “Shook Down,” “Stutter,” “Sunday”), each of which are both familiar and elusive (two of the best qualities music can have, in my opinion). Yuck may not have invented its own sound, but its songs belong to no one else. -MB

12. Katy B - On A Mission

Two of On a Mission’s primary producers, Zinc and Geeneus, are survivors of the UK garage boom of the late 90s and early 00s. Two others, Skream and Benga (who collaborate with Artwork as Magnetic Men), helped define dubstep as a genre. As dubstep and its offshoot UK funky transition into pop forces, and UK garage builds upon the comeback it mounted in 2010, it’s fitting that these four collaborated on Katy B’s debut. On a Mission all but establishes the blueprint for a successful, dubstep-based pop album. The flashpoint is the title track, “Katy on a Mission,” which churns with gnarly synths and muffled vocal clips before dropping a monstrous bass pulse. Benga’s production provides a British parallel to US pop’s current house obsession—the way it establishes momentum with just a few chords and a propulsive bass line has echoes in Rihanna’s “We Found Love,” for example. Of course, this is Katy B’s album. While she’s not the flashiest vocalist, Katy B excels in the exact area that dubstep requires: rhythm. She utilizes syncopation and vocal changes at a level hinted at on, say, SBTRKT, but mostly absent on dubstep’s crossover tracks—most of whom feature house-indebted divas. The result is a resolutely British album, rooted in tradition, with a firm idea of the near-future. -MB

11. Das Racist - Relax

Recurring themes on Relax, including guest verses - laughter, myriad Terror Squad references, not taking shit too seriously, taking shit seriously, money, how people in rap make money, how people around rap make money, 90s pop culture references, 00s pop culture references, literature, twitter, women, honesty, honestly relating to women (who may or may not have a pool), race, real life vs what rappers talk about, cultural relativism, crypto-Kanye references (what did you think “Michael Jackson” was about?), food, white castle, language (“half internet, half high school cafeteria shit”), meta-commentary by song title and sequence placement despite lyrical content or tone (“Booty In the Air” “Happy Rappy”, “Brand New Dance”), how rapping gets boring, even when you’re only a couple years in, the internet, recently dead musicians, being the best rappers alive. The last one is only implied. The criticisms of Relax have largely been that it feels more mainstream than the two previous free releases and that it’s weird that “Rainbow in the Dark” is being reused without any alteration. And yeah, both of those criticisms are valid and in some way true. The other big one, indicated by the first two examples, is that it felt like Das Racist didn’t seem to have the worldbeating urge that seemed to drive them to drop Shut Up, Dude and Sit Down, Man back to back. Which is bullshit, and exactly the reactions you hear on everybody’s major label debut, or whatever - the first album they’ve charged money for. Relax isn’t the album that people wanted/expected, it’s where Das Racist is right now. And thank god they’re not at all interested in giving a fuck about who’s listening, or what they want, even as they talk about who’s listening. -SW

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Obvs. the Weeknd is going to put in an appearance here, but I will be so beyond pleased if Yamantaka//Sonic Titan's debut shows up also. I'll also cross my fingers for XV's "Zero Heroes" mixtape and "Hello Sadness" by Los Campesinos!

I thought Wild Flag was reasonably fun but kinda boring(Ice Brigade can be described in roughly the same way actually), and Yuck...I like their first album a lot but a really good song I've heard a million times before is still a song I've heard a million times before, you know? I don't really know that their whole "savior of indie rock" status is really earned from doing one basic thing in a really solid and engaging way.

That Main Attrakionz album is also teetering on "dislike" for me just because they perpetually sound like they're being dragged to church even when they're happy about something. Nice to see Grails on here, that was a neat surprise.